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8chan goes dark after hardware provider discontinues service

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Re: 8chan goes dark after hardware provider discontinues service

#271

Post by sneak »

jordigh wrote: post #243
Smithalicious wrote: post #215

This once again goes to show that you can do nothing illegal and still be virtually locked out of the internet. The viewpoint that "it's okay to kick 8chan off the internet" is not consistent with the viewpoint that "the internet should be neutral infrastructure". Take from that what you will. People are doing the "yada yada not entitled to a platform" thing, but the distinction between free speech and having a platf…

It's fine, we can get rid of the bad. It's not impossible to tell good and bad apart, so we don't need to keep the bad if we also want the good. The slopes are not that slippery. Germany isn't a dystopian hell-hole because they banned Nazism.

No, Germany is a dystopian hell-hole because the taxes are insane and collected without consent, the free and unrestricted private ownership of arms by Jews is still prohibited by the German state, and the entirety of the society is heavily surveilled by the BND.

Also, video games and other harmless expressions of art are subject to prior restraint, if you wish to nonviolently depict violence.

It’s insane.

I call it the invisible dystopia: it is transparent to 99% of human beings who do nothing exceptional or out of the ordinary. Only when you start to challenge the status quo does it begin to affect you, like a prison with invisible walls.

Re: 8chan goes dark after hardware provider discontinues service

#272

Post by fgdaniels »

CydeWeys wrote: post #76

We wouldn't tolerate the existence of an Islamist site that glorified and helped perpetrate mass incidents of terror against our society. What 8chan is doing is exactly the same, minus the Islamist part, yet there's hypocrisy in how they're treated vs e.g. the social media wing of ISIS. These people are trying to kill as many of us as possible. In no way should society accept it. It's simple societal self-defense. Ro…

[flagged]

Re: 8chan goes dark after hardware provider discontinues service

#273

Post by o_p »

idlewords wrote: post #191
o_p wrote: post #180

This is a ridiculous witchhunt, 8chan is a platform for many different boards with different opinions, the media framing it as a right-wing white supremacist forum makes wonder if its ignorance or malice, /leftypol/ is probably as big as the /pol/ boogeyman, and thats just politics which is just a part of the rest of the boards. No one is asking to close Facebook because Tarrant uploaded his shooting video there, why…

The media will tend to focus on the part of any site that promotes and radicalizes participants into mass murder. Facebook, as you know, moved extremely aggressively to remove the NZ shooting video, along with other extremist content. Basically Facebook employs a raft of people to prevent the thing that 8chan was trying to encourage.

Again, 8chan is not one person, most users dont encourage this at all because it brings problems like exactly this one. Its the price of a truly free platform, sadly it seems americans hate freedom.

In the practical sense, I doubt this will counter shootings at all, intelligence services had them contained in a single board, now they will just spill around the internet.

Re: 8chan goes dark after hardware provider discontinues service

#274

Post by 2ion »

nilkn wrote: post #4

I've generally been on the free speech side of this debate, as some of my previous comments on HN will show. With 8chan, I legitimately don't know what my opinion is. I've read it before, and I spent a few hours reading it this weekend, and it's beyond clear to me that it absolutely had the potential to radicalize shooters and terrorists. I'm not referring to the simple use of racial or ethnic slurs -- of course this…

> thread of support

So framing an event and pushing a narrative when one neither likes the frame nor the narrative is now an offence requiring the sacking of media?

When mass-media is busy framing and legitimizting the next War On Something it's in the cards again!

Hypocrisy.

If people can't handle reality, you should accept that not shut it out.

Re: 8chan goes dark after hardware provider discontinues service

#275

Post by lubesGordi »

adamch wrote: post #186
DrDimension wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The truth is that information does not radicalize people - censorship does. That's why the channers are as radicalized as they are - they've been censored everywhere else. Censor their last remaining outlets and you will increase violence by orders of magnitude. If ethno-nationalists are not allowed to make their political case with speech, what alternative would they have but violence? You obviously can't change the…

A lot of people say "censorship radicalizes" but I've never seen any studies or evidence for this claim. Your comment is purely speculative. There is some evidence that banning extremist content reduces its potential to radicalize [1]. Do you have any evidence to suggest it increases radicalization? [1] http://comp.social.gatech.edu/papers/cscw18-chand-hate.pdf

Maybe not radicalizes but seems obvious that censorship sort of 'funnels' the extremists onto the same forums which turn into an echo chamber / amplification chamber for their ideas. It seems like if they were tolerated on other forums that there'd be enough mediating comments to prevent the amplification. I'd also be interested in seeing studies that echo chambers increase radicalization in the first place. That seems to be a given right now.

Re: 8chan goes dark after hardware provider discontinues service

#276

Post by bloopernova »

RandomTisk wrote: post #8

I'm still waiting for a new platform to take the world by storm: The freedom of Gab, with sane content filtering options to make it look as tame as reddit so by default users don't see all the fringe crap, but lets them if they really want, right to the legal edge.

> with sane content filtering options to make it look as tame as reddit

People are really, really good at circumventing automated filters, while non automated filtering means subjecting people to horrific content for 8 hours a day.

I really want to be on the side of the broadest possible interpretation of free speech, but my experience leads me in a different direction. It's been my experience that corralling the fringe doesn't work because the people in that fringe are intent on spreading their message/content as far and wide as possible. Even against the wishes of the general populace of a given site like Reddit. That behaviour seems to spring from the same attention-seeking place as that of griefers like Goonswarm in EVE, whose stated goal was at one point to ruin as many people's fun in that game as possible.

So there's perhaps two parts to the freedom of speech argument space: One is that there are people who want to create/share/consume content that the general populace doesn't want to see. Then the second is that there are people who aren't acting in good faith, whose goal seems to be to ruin as much as possible.

The first group there will probably keep to themselves, manage their communities and cooperate with governmental authorities to remove illegal content or activities. Of course that doesn't take into account when those groups are acting against those authorities while still having the moral support of most of the population. For instance campaigning for marijuana legalization, which most people would say should be protected speech.

But then there's the second group, who hide within the first often enough, or who falsely act like the first because they want to destroy things because they seem to have no emotional investment in society. (in my opinion)

The second group thrives because no one wants to commit the manpower to track and manage them. I don't know how to fix that problem, I don't even know if it's possible. Heck there will be many who will argue it's not necessary at all.

Re: 8chan goes dark after hardware provider discontinues service

#277

Post by pickle-wizard »

tepidandroid wrote: post #139

My opinion is that freedom of speech is a fine ideal to strive for, but it relies on having a stable society with some minimum level of education (moral and philosophical too, not just the technical kind). It requires people who are able to fully parse the implications of what they are hearing to make sound and rational judgements on the rejection of an idea or the embrace of it. It creates a moral duty for the peopl…

Relavent XKCD https://xkcd.com/1357/

Re: 8chan goes dark after hardware provider discontinues service

#278

Post by SkyBelow »

Smithalicious wrote: post #215

This once again goes to show that you can do nothing illegal and still be virtually locked out of the internet. The viewpoint that "it's okay to kick 8chan off the internet" is not consistent with the viewpoint that "the internet should be neutral infrastructure". Take from that what you will. People are doing the "yada yada not entitled to a platform" thing, but the distinction between free speech and having a platf…

Makes me wonder how many people like GPL and free software. One of the core tenants of free software is the ability to do anything with it (freedom 0). This includes being able to do evil.

https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html

The original JSON license is even deemed not free because it limits the ability to use it for Evil.

https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.en.html#JSON

There is a reason for this decision and it applies to speech as much as it does to software.

Re: 8chan goes dark after hardware provider discontinues service

#279

Post by Karunamon »

ulkesh wrote: post #248
piker wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What people (seemingly) fail to realise is that neither Cloudflare is the Internet nor Voxility is a public infrastructure. Everyone realizes that. We're past relying on the First Amendment argument.

> Everyone realizes that. Based on some of the posts in this thread, I disagree.

There are a lot of people in this thread that don't seem to understand the difference between the law and the principle.

The first amendment law protects the principle. It doesn't create it. While these hosts might not be in violation of any law, they are absolutely acting contrary to the principle of free speech.

Re: 8chan goes dark after hardware provider discontinues service

#280

Post by rebuilder »

tombert wrote: post #50
nilkn wrote: post #4

I've generally been on the free speech side of this debate, as some of my previous comments on HN will show. With 8chan, I legitimately don't know what my opinion is. I've read it before, and I spent a few hours reading it this weekend, and it's beyond clear to me that it absolutely had the potential to radicalize shooters and terrorists. I'm not referring to the simple use of racial or ethnic slurs -- of course this…

I think I'm on the same boat as you on this one; I tend to have a pretty libertarian view on free speech, but lately the bizarre rise of hyper-radical idiots on places like 8chan (and even YouTube to a lesser extent) has really made me question these things. It's very easy to shout the mantra of "Free speech!!! OMG!!!" but we gain nothing by acting like there aren't natural consequences to it. By having a liberal fre…

It's tough to make the distinction between acceptable and unacceptable speech on a case-by-case basis.

The classic extremist play is to patiently gnaw at the edges of acceptability. Subtle digs at Jews, blacks, Hispanics, muslims or non-muslims (you can insert any group here, really) pave the way for innuendos about their morals, work ethic, intellectual capacity etc.

You can gaslight perfectly normal, upstanding citizens into doubting their strongly held ethical convictions, first enough that they don't argue against e.g. racist loudmouths, then to the point that they don't argue for equal treatment of "out" groups. As this process plays out, it starts to seem dangerous to defend the maligned against violence, and eventually enough citizens will have had their sense of normal behaviour pushed far enough that atrocities become possible.

I don't know how to break that cycle. I do think the root causes need to be addressed, because poverty and social decline provide fertile ground for demagogues pointing fingers.

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